If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Programming in Basic causes brain damage.

...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.

Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.